


times arrow, bent to three hundred and sixty degrees

by taffeta



Category: Little Nightmares (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe I guess?, F/M, another loop another six and mono, attempts to make sense of the events leading up to LN2 (and VLN), chap 2 is from six's perspective, extremely self indulgent, first chapter is mostly from mono's perspective, forties fifties whatever theyre fucking old, mono and six reunite in their forties, not necessarily the same lady/thin man as in Ouroboros, the narrative is nonlinear rip, this world is horrible and mono is so sweet protect the boy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 02:22:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29943069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taffeta/pseuds/taffeta
Summary: There's a fairy tale to be found here, or at the very least, a moral. But neither of them are very good at following the plot.The introspective study and eventual reunification of a girl in a raincoat and a boy from the forest.
Relationships: Mono/Six (Little Nightmares), The Lady/The Thin Man (Little Nightmares)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 34





	times arrow, bent to three hundred and sixty degrees

**Author's Note:**

> Me, trying to come up with a valid reason as to how and why Six wound up from the cliffside mansion to a dinky little wooden cabin: oh miku we’re really in it now
> 
> Note: The Abscess (n. a localized collection of pus surrounded by inflamed tissue) is the name I bestowed on the massive flesh monster in LN2, since, at least at the time of me writing this I don’t believe it has been given an official title. 
> 
> **Edit: found out they’re simply called flesh walls. For the sake of this work, which is making the monster out to be a bigger plot point/the catalyst for the circumstances of this world, I’m sticking with my nickname**

_It rose in great waves around him, above him, keeping him unsteady on his own two feet. The flesh gave way when he wobbled, and the boy plunged both hands in the undulating mass underneath him. He squeezed the pink tissue, and blood pooled in the cracks of his fingers. One of its many eyes turned to him as he did this, and there was no misinterpreting what lurked in its puckered glare. Anger, perhaps. Pain, most definitely._

_I understand, thought the boy, and dropped to his knees, allowing the quivering mass to unbalance him. The boy tore at the creature, the inviting bubblegum pink of its skin trailed with green and purple veins turning into mush, frothing viscera underneath his lithe, tan fingers. It began to wail, a long, lonely note that never seemed to stop, in the same way that, as Mono tore through layer upon layer of flesh that simply gave way to more healthy pink muscle, never seemed to stop. The boy kept ripping, and, in time, the great beast’s howls turned to laughs._

\-------------

Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a big forest. 

The world outside of the forest was inhabited by evil monsters, and so he was never allowed to go any further than a few miles away from where he lived—in the trunk of a gnarled sycamore tree, forty feet tall and yet not nearly tall enough to match some of the others that surrounded it. But the boy, as many children are, was curious of the outside world, even after the tales of the horrid beasts that lurked outside, and one day he strayed a little too far off the beaten path. The boy found himself on the lip of the forest, and, from across a field of flat grass, his eyes got wide and his heart started to race, for there, in the distance, was a city. 

A forest of warped metal and concrete, bellowing black pollution into the dark grey sky. The boy took one step, his toes curling underneath the soft grass when he heard something shuffle behind him. He froze. The shadow climbed to its full height, blotting out the boy’s entire body in darkness, and, far too late to run now, he turned around and saw—

Mono rolled his eyes dramatically. He slumped against the headboard of his bed, the back of his skull thumping dully as it connected with the wood. 

“You’ve told me this story a thousand times, Oma. Do I get attacked by the snake-tailed woman or the bat-winged devil with a thousand eyes?”

The old woman chuckled, her leafy shawl shuffling as her shoulders moved, and smoothed down the hair on Mono’s forehead. 

“Neither. Today it was going to be the ten-foot-tall sheriff with a hat made out of human skin. But my warning must still be heeded, little one. Never go too far away from the commune. There are things lurking, always lurking, looking for precious meat.” 

Mono thought of the snake-tailed woman—the only monster Oma had told him about that made the blood run chilly through his veins—and shook his head, trying to dispel the image of her hideous form from his mind. 

_‘What’s stopping them from coming here and eating us all up?’ he’d asked her once, and when she turned to him, pinned him with a single look that told Mono everything he needed to know, he never asked again._

“I don’t want to hear that story again,” he drew the covers near his chin, curling himself up underneath the covers, the exhaustion coming in suddenly and fast like a wave, “tell me the other one. The one of how the world got like this.” 

That one was one of Mono’s favorites, and Oma knew it. A keen smile played at the corners of her lips. She cleared her throat dramatically, re-adjusted in the bench next to his bed. He reached for her hand and held the wrinkled flesh between his own..

“Well, if you so insist, who am I to deprive you of a good story? Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, the world was beautiful. The sun rose and fell every day, the sky was blue, and everywhere you went, animals frolicked and birds sang.”

Mono tried to imagine it. He’d seen the sun many years ago, the rays peeking out from the thick, leafy foliage of the trees, but, like all things in time, the memory was blurry and frayed at the edges. The details were fuzzy. But he remembered the feeling of standing underneath a sunbeam, the warmth of it that didn’t burn him cruelly. The way, when he closed his eyes, it lit up his eyelids so he could see the translucent veins there. 

Involuntarily, he pressed his hand against his cheek, pretending as if the warmth of his hand wasn’t him, but the sun. His eyes slipped shut. Oma continued. 

“But one day, something big and horrible rose up from the depths of the ocean. The beast had ten-thousand hateful eyes and didn’t look like anything the people back then had ever seen. For it, which came out of the water, had no skin; no fur to keep it warm; no blubber to protect it against the ocean’s cold.” 

Oma’s last words hung in the air, as outside, someone shrieked.

\-------------

And after a longer time, The Abscess trickled away.

The flesh escaped from wherever it could—the tiniest cracks in the concrete, the razor-thin scratches in the walls, squeezing itself through holes made by two-inch tall creatures lost to time many years ago—until every single trace of it was gone. The only clue that it had ever even been there was the thin coating of sticky, wet slime that painted the ceiling, floors, and the walls, and in time, that faded as well, and the boy—no longer really a boy, now, growing into something else—sat stationary on his stool. Sometimes, he would tap his fingers against his knees. Sometimes, he would try to hum the tune to a song he remembered from a very long time ago, but the reminder of something before made him a little melancholy, and eventually, he stopped making noise altogether. 

It had oozed away, undoubtedly off to cause chaos in some other corner of the world; most of it gone, but not all because Mono knew that a piece of the flesh beast had crawled its way inside his brain. 

He could feel it worming away in the grey matter, tried to beat it out of his own skull when he initially became aware of the feeling of something wet and sticky sliding across the skin of his cheek and into his ear canal. He beat against his own skull until the roar of his aching brain became unbearable; and as if The Abscess could feel the second the pain inched across that milestone, it receded. 

Only a chair left in its wake; and, with nothing else to do—no way out, he’d combed the room, only to discover four walls, no entrance, no exit—he sat on the stool and curled in on himself, knees pressed up against his chest. 

Perhaps she hadn’t meant it. Perhaps this whole thing had been a funny misunderstanding. Maybe they’d be laughing about it by tomorrow morning. 

He imagined her now; peering down at him through the hole in the floor, a pole or a rope, something he could climb on and upwards to freedom, a thin smile on her face as if to say, _‘what, you thought I’d actually leave you?’_

Mono kept looking, up into the darkness of the signal tower that had gone completely silent since they stormed the castle and killed the dragon, metaphorically speaking. Nothing made a sound. The seconds turned into hours turned into weeks. The hunger rumbled in his stomach, and he could do nothing but clutch his abdomen and weep. 

And on the third week, The Abscess spoke. 

\-------------

The boy walked. Dazed, and exhausted, until he came upon not a city spewing black smoke, but a cabin. A rotting thing at the edge of the wood, something he could smell long before he could see. The reek of foul meat against the comforting aroma of pine and dirt made his eyes water; and yet, some primal force in him edged the boy closer to this place of ruin. He knew that he was meant to be there. The front door was pushed open ever so slightly, a tantalizing invitation. _We’ve been expecting you, dear boy!_

He stumbled forward. as if there were any other directions for the boy to go. Everything else behind him was dead. The blood on the back of his bag-mask was still dripping wetly, fat drops of red plinking against the ground and splattering wetly against the back of his ankle. 

A tinny-sounding melody, nothing more than two or three notes on repeat, came from the cracked door, and with both hands on the wood itching to push it open, Mono paused. Cocked his head. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere inside of the house. 

The boy opened the door. The faint song of the melody played its continuous, monotonous loop. When it puttered to a stop, Mono noticed a new sound—like a zipper being pulled, maybe, some nameless thing using some unknowable magic to keep the sound alive. 

In that cabin in the woods, the boy stumbled down the nearest staircase, leading down to the basement. The air was dingy, a thin beam of moonlight beaming through a filthy window. Mono peered through a hole in one of the dingy, peeling doors, and saw them, then. A child, just like him, in a bright yellow raincoat that seemed out of place in this dreary lit hell. 

They don’t tell you this part of the story.

\-------------

“Sometimes I have bad dreams about that place.”

Mono pointed accusingly at the rapidly approaching outline of the city. The girl in the raincoat paused briefly as he spoke, but didn’t look at him. She clicked the lighter, and a tiny flame burst in front of her dark eyes, partially obscured by her matted hair. He wanted to brush it out of her face if only so she could see better, but the girl didn’t seem to mind. 

Besides; Mono was mostly afraid that if he got anywhere near her, he’d come back with a couple less fingers. 

He continued, “It’s a long dream, but I don’t really ever remember a lot about it. A little bit of the beginning, the city, and then the end.”

The beginning; an axe. 

Mono had forced himself to tamper down a serious case of deja-vu when he sliced through the wet wood that kept the girl trapped, thinking, with each hit, _I’ve done this before, I’ve done this before in my dreams and when I get through the door she’ll reach for me and run_ , because that’s what happened every single time he saved her.

Tearing up the stairs to get past him, the girl didn’t disappoint. 

“And in the end,” Mono smacked his bare feet against their makeshift wooden raft. The girl flicked the lighter on and off. On and off.

“In the end, I’m always in a room. Just sitting there. It’s not very scary, not like the stories of the snake-woman Oma used to tell me before bed, but…I’m always really sad when I wake up. Like I lost something really, really important, like my bag.” 

Mono tugged on the edge of the paper mask. “But when I wake up my bag is still there. So it’s not that.” 

He looked up, and nearly startled when he saw the girl looking at him, frowning. Her brows furrowed in something that was either anger or confusion, as if she wanted to tell him something but couldn’t find the words to express herself. 

Mono adjusted, stretching his legs from their stiff position underneath him. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before—I guess we didn’t have the time, getting chased by that—“ he trailed off, righted himself quickly, “sorry. Guess it doesn’t matter now. My name is Mono. Mo-no. Do you have a name?”

The girl seemed to consider this, gently placing her lighter in her pocket. Her mouth was set in a thoughtful frown as opposed to her signature angry one. Her lip fell open, revealing a row of white teeth as if she was going to say something. The girl shut her mouth. 

Suddenly, her arm sprang out; she grabbed Mono’s left wrist with a strength that didn’t quite match her small frame, and this time he did startle, trying to pull himself away from her iron grip.

“Hey! What are you—“

The girl pressed the sharp nail of her index finger into the brown skin of his hand. There was a quick, scratching pain, and suddenly he was free again. Mono snatched it back, holding it up to the light of the grey sky to survey the damage.

“That hurt! Give me a warning next time you do that!” He yelled, pouting at her, and the girl smirked mischievously as if she understood, and then tapped her own hand where she’d scratched his. She pointed to him and pointed back to his hand. He held his arm up, to see a symbol. 

Mono couldn’t read even if his life depended on it—no one at the commune, in his makeshift family living in the trees, had never bothered to teach him how to read, an unnecessary ability in a world of kill or be killed— but he did remember at least some of his numbers. Anything beyond ten though was a mystery.

On Mono’s hand, the tail curved into a fat belly, made from his own ashen skin. 

_6._

“Six?” he raised his eyes cautiously, and the girl—Six—nodded furiously, clapping her hands together like she’d just taught her pet a new trick. Two tiny indents appeared on either side of her mouth when a bemused grin lifted the harshness of her face, and he dared to inch closer, taking advantage of her improved mood. 

“That’s a weird name. But I like it.” Mono smiled very slightly. “Did someone give you that name? Or did you think of it yourself?”

The grin on her face gave way to another puzzled look. She opened her mouth and closed it. Opened, and closed it, like a gasping fish out of water, nose scrunched up in frustration. Mono watched, feeling a little sad for her. Clearly, Six wanted to tell him something—at least about her past, the story of her name, or how she got to the cabin—but she didn’t quite possess the language to do so. 

_‘One of the wildlings'_ , he thought to himself. Mono had lucked out by finding a troupe of survivors, who’d taught him how to work together with others, who emphasized the idea of community. They’d taught him how to speak and socialize. To express himself.

 _And now they’re all dead._ Mono beat the realization away like a stray gnat. 

They’d encountered wildlings many times during his years in the woods; alone, not much more than skin and bones, they’d been raised by nothing and no one, more feral beasts than child. They would prowl the camps at night, waiting on the outskirts for either scraps of food to swipe, or, even worse, for the lone man or woman walking too close to the edge. They never spoke; never made a sound besides a growl, grunts, or their screams of fury and terror as they were put down brutally by the tribe’s hunters. 

But Six didn’t quite strike him as a wildling. She was filthy, sure, but very well fed, as if someone had been taking care of her instead of leaving her to fend for herself; she was clearly intelligent enough to write numbers and expressed a want to communicate. 

As if she’d heard him, Six spoke. 

“Big place, tall house where ocean close. Woman…” her lips stuttered, and she moved her hands, as if to speak her truth with fingers alone, “me tell. Six.”

She pointed to her chest. 

“Tell me, Six. Other like me are names, too. Four, Seven. I go away in ocean.” she cupped her hands, moving her arms in a rowing motion. Swimming, Mono thought, captivated by her story, she swam to get away. 

Six paused. Reflexively, she brought the yellow raincoat closer, looking out toward the sea. 

“Many things in ocean. Like you.” she turned, pinning him down with a look he couldn’t quite place, “you think of there?” 

Six pointed to the skyline of the city, looming ever closer. Mono nodded. 

“I think here.” She leaned over and plunged her fingers into the water. She brought a scoopful of it up in her hand. It ran through the cracks in her fingers as she separated them, still staring at it in quiet reverence. 

“Ocean. When night is here, I think in the ocean.” 

“I…you dream of the ocean? Like I dream of the city? Is that right?” he asked, and a dreamy little smile crawled onto the corners of her face. She patted his knee appreciatively, bobbing her head. He could practically see the gears in her head turning, her mouth quivering in anticipation of saying more. But the words dried out like water in the sun, and instead, she turned her attention once more towards the silent metropolis.

“Close.” She said, and that was that. If they survived what came next, Mono promised himself in that moment that he would teach her how to speak or die trying. 

“Yeah. Really close.” Debris undoubtedly cast out by the pale city drifted by them lazily. A tangle of wires and green motherboards, some of them still smoking, waded close, and Mono pushed it away with his stick before setting the weapon/makeshift-paddle back down next to him. 

Together, him sitting next to her, they looked out at the skyline, tall building atop tall building looking out into the vastness of the ocean. Something was here, he knew. Waiting for him. The worst part was not knowing what. 

“We can do this.” Mono murmured, a hollow comfort for the anxiety and downright terror building up in his chest. The fear was bubbling in him, threatening to untether him, and he did the only thing he knew how to do.

He reached over and grabbed Six’s hand. 

The girl barely moved. In fact, the only real reaction he got was a sly side eye, remnants on her face of something that didn’t quite bloom to be a smile. Six looked straight ahead and squeezed Mono’s fingers right back. The raft carried on. 

\-------------

 _I want to read a bedtime story. I want to hold her hand_. 

He transmitted these thoughts directly to the piece of monster in his brain, the one who spoke to him, kept him alive without food or water. He got no response, for a long stretch of time, until it came to him with a voice from the lips of a dying man. From a creature who prowled the deepest pits of the trenches of the ocean. 

_**But I can give you so much more than that. So much better**_ , it said. 

And Mono listened.

\-------------

“Help me, Six!” 

She looked as if she meant to. Six took one step back, then another, all the while holding onto Mono’s shaking fingers as he kicked his legs and felt nothing but open air. 

And then, something in her face changed. He watched it happen in real-time, unable to stop it, unable to realize what was even happening when that darkness crept up in her features. The light in her eyes glazed over. Her mouth bent into a straight line. And when she locked eyes with him, his breath caught in his throat when Mono saw no recognition at all in them.

“Six?” he asked, a mere whisper against the din of The Abscess, creeping ever closer. Her grip loosened, and he squeezed harder, despite the sweat on his palms making it nearly impossible to grip anything. 

_The beast had ten-thousand hateful eyes and didn’t look like anything the people back then had ever seen. For it, which came out of the water, had no skin; no fur to keep it warm; no blubber to protect it against the ocean’s cold--_

Six freed her hand. And the last he saw was the filthy heel of her foot as she turned tail and ran.

 _'Good luck’_ , he thought. The Abscess rose up to greet him.

\-------------

Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a great forest.

But something awful had happened to that boy, and he was turned into a monster made of radio signals and static. Things that could not survive out in the antithesis of technology, in nature.

And thus, the boy—now a man, really—looked through the open windows of his Signal Tower, down, down across the broad, silent city he now controlled, forced to look beyond that, to the place he once called home.

And beyond even that, was the ocean. The Thin Man could see it now, his target—The Maw, crawling up from the depths of the inky water, its spout belching steam like a geyser. 

It was the first time he’d ever seen it this close, undoubtedly getting ready to dock and pick up the—very few—residents who still retained at least a semblance of their sane mind for their underwater getaway. It would be the first (and the last) time for many years to come that he’d get this chance. 

The mole, his mole, would likely be nearby the docks at this point, ticket in hand, patiently waiting in line like the rest of the monstrous patrons, the television and its accompanying signal booster stowed away in a pocket dimension undetectable by even the best of the ship’s sniffers. 

And when The Maw departed from the port, he would be traveling with it. With Her. The legendary Lady of The Maw, a figure of legend just as much as himself, the woman who'd dropped the raincoat in favor of the Noh mask and silk kimono. 

The Thin Man breathed in deep, flickering in and out of reality. It was time to show her what he'd learned.

**Author's Note:**

> we love a cliff hanger.
> 
> Again, part two is gonna be mostly from six's perspective.


End file.
